Best all-in-one
Epson EcoTank ET-2800
The cheapest way to get genuinely low-cost color printing at home, as long as you can live without an auto duplexer or a document feeder.
Home printers, without the ink trap
Best printers without a subscription
The cheapest-to-run home printers, ranked by real cost per page rather than sticker price. Ink tank and laser picks that need no monthly plan — and every number here shows the supply, its rated yield, the price we used and the date we checked it.
- Cheapest page we found
- 0.3¢
- Supplies priced and dated
- 12
- Prices checked
- 27 September
- Printers we claim to have tested
- 0
That last number is deliberate. We have no lab and no units in hand, so instead of claiming tests we publish the arithmetic and its sources. How we work.
What we recommend
The picks, and what each one costs to run
Six categories, six winners. Each links to the full comparison that chose it, and every cost-per-page figure on those pages shows the supply, its rated yield, the price we used and the date we read it.
Best laser, no plan
Brother HL-L2460DW
If you print black text and nothing else, this is the printer to buy. It cannot dry out, it duplexes, and Brother does not block third-party toner.
Best on a budget
Epson EcoTank ET-2400
The cheapest entry into bottle-fed ink. It runs on exactly the same 522 ink as the ET-2800, so the cost per page is identical - you are only giving up some hardware.
Best for a home office
Brother DCP-L2640DW
The HL-L2460DW with a scanner and a 50-page feeder on top. For most home offices that need to scan, this is the sensible mono laser.
Best for color
Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270
The cheapest cost per page of any printer we cover, and the pigment black is the reason to pick it over an EcoTank if your prints get handled.
Best EcoTank
Epson EcoTank ET-2800
The cheapest way to get genuinely low-cost color printing at home, as long as you can live without an auto duplexer or a document feeder.
Start with the question you actually have
Six sections, each answering one thing people ask before buying a home printer.
Section
Printers Without a Subscription
The whole point of the site: printers that need no monthly plan, ranked by real cost per page. Start here if you are leaving a subscription.
Section
Ink Tank Printers
Refillable tanks, no cartridges, a fraction of a cent per page. The section to read if you print regularly and in color.
Section
Laser Printers
Toner instead of ink, so nothing dries out between jobs. The right answer for sporadic black-text printing.
Section
Cost Per Page
The number that decides everything: what a page actually costs. The formula, the caveats, and a working calculator.
Section
Ink Freedom
Printer DRM, firmware lockouts and each brand's current position - sourced to named reporting and dated, because ink policies change.
Section
Printers by Use Case
Start from what you print, not from a spec sheet. Homework, home office, dorm room, photographs, gifts.
The thing nobody else publishes
What a page actually costs
The spread between the cheapest and dearest printer we cover is roughly twentyfold, and none of it is printed on any box. The cheapest black page we found is about 0.3 of a cent and the cheapest color page about 0.8 of a cent. The dearest is several cents for black text alone.
The formula is not complicated — supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated page yield — and the reason we built a site around it is that almost nobody in this category does the division and shows their inputs.
How this site is different
Every number shows its inputs
No bare cost-per-page figure appears anywhere here. Each one names the supply, its rated page yield, the price we used and the date we read it, and links to the method.
We say what we do not test
No lab, no printers on a bench, no measured print samples. Our work is arithmetic on published inputs, which you can reproduce — unlike a test result you have to take on trust.
No scores, no star ratings
A rating with no test behind it is a number with nothing underneath it. There are none here, in the visible copy or in the structured data — and no testimonials, because we have no customers to quote.
Buyer first, even when it costs us
The advice we repeat most often is that light printers should buy a cheap mono laser rather than an expensive tank printer. It earns us less every time. Our policy.
Read these first
Four pages that carry most of what this site has to say.
- Printers without a subscriptionThe whole argument, and the two printers most households should choose between.
- Cost per page calculatorTwo numbers in, one number out. Runs in your browser; stores nothing.
- The cheapest printers to runEverything we cover, ranked mechanically, with every input visible.
- Printer DRM explainedHow ink lockouts work, and the one kind of printer they cannot apply to.
Latest
- Best all-in-one printers without a subscription
- Best laser printers without a subscription
- Cheapest printers without a subscription
- Best home office printers without a subscription
- Best color printers without a subscription
- Best Epson EcoTank printers
- Best Canon MegaTank printers
- Best budget ink tank printers
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How this site is funded
Affiliate links, principally Amazon. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases — if you buy through a link here we may receive a commission, at no extra cost to you. We show no live prices; the retailer’s own page is always the price of record.
The reason you can check that commission does not steer the recommendations, rather than taking it on faith, is that our picks keep pointing at the cheaper machine. Tank & Toner is published by Magoo Media Group.